Tom Cruise's 'Mission: Impossible: Fallout' Has The Year's Best Trailer

I was pretty hard on Paramount yesterday. Even I would argue that the relative failures of movies like Annihilation and Downsizing are as much about the scary new marketplace (where adults don’t go to the movies for adult entertainment) as with the films themselves or any outside variables (competition, marketing, reviews, etc.), I haven’t had many opportunities to say nice things about the studio, even with all the huzzahs I tossed in mother’s direction last September. So, in the interest of trying not to be a total jerk, I wanted to take a few moments to note something that I should have noted nearly a month ago.

Paramount’s lone great hope for 2018 is Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible Fallout. Bumblebee may be so good that it retroactively saves the Transformers franchise, and heck with Travis Knight (the head of Laika and director of Kubo and the Two Strings) in the director’s chair I will walk in expecting the best. But in terms of surefire franchise/tentpole biggies, it’s essentially up to the sixth installment of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt franchise to save the day. So I should have taken more time either on Super Bowl Sunday or soon afterward to note that the first trailer for Mission: Impossible Fallout is the best movie trailer for any summer 2018 release.

That’s not to say that Christopher McQuarrie’s second turn in the director’s chair of what was once a revolving door (the previous five films had five distinctly different directors) will be the best movie of the summer, or that a future trailer for the likes of Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2 or Ocean’s 8 won’t take the cake as we get closer to the summer kick-off. But thus far, the trailer, that dropped on Super Bowl Sunday and was somewhat drowned out by chatter about Solo and The Cloverfield Paradox, is a dynamite piece of marketing, both in that it makes the movie look superb and operates as a stand-alone piece of entertainment. It also shows off lots of action without spoiling the story.

The two-minute teaser opens with a 30-second bit of Rogue Nation baddie Sean Harris (the first big bad to survive his encounter with Ethan Hunt) discussing Hunt’s moral (or actual) downfall before we get to the big show. We then get a quick bit about the storyline (Ethan apparently puts the lives of his teammates over the completion of a mission and puts the world in nuclear peril), a bit which reunites Hunt and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust in a way that reassures fans that she won’t be a love interest, plenty of character reunions for Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames and even Michelle Monaghan as Hunt's ex-wife who was seemingly written out of the franchise at the end of Ghost Protocol.

And the first act of this trailer gifts us with a monologue, from newbie Henry Cavill and the mustache that destroyed the Justice League to fellow newbie Angela Bassett, which finally notes the absurdity of IMF turning on their star pupil in nearly every installment. All of this is set to a pulsating variation of the classic Lalo Schifrin theme music (technically an Imagine Dragons song entitled “Friction”) which eventually gives way into a third-act montage filled with brutal fisticuffs, car chases, motorcycle stunts, an occasional gun battle and plenty of wacky Tom Cruise stunts, including a clever reversal of the first film’s action finale.

The trailer ends with a montage of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt failing spectacularly in a manner which would make Will E. Coyote or Jackie Chan proud. It’s the core dichotomy of the recent entries: Ethan Hunt is a Mary Sue, err, the living manifestation of destiny, but sometimes he’ll miss the jump by *that* much. This is a gloriously entertaining bit of movie marketing, planting a flag in the sand as a true event movie even sans conventional superheroes or otherworldly spectacle. It’s a perfect cocktail of varied action thrills, teases of character and story and a mix of franchise nostalgia and reassurances that the franchise’s hitting streak won’t be ending this July.

There is a certain irony in the Mission: Impossible series starting as a then-groundbreaking star+concept pitch (from an actor who otherwise had avoided conventional action movies) and now thriving, 21 years later, as a rare specimen of an A-level real-world action franchise and a specifically star-driven enterprise. And while the series may have begun with Ethan Hunt as “Tom Cruise: Generic Action Man” in between James Bond flicks, the franchise slowly became not just Cruise’s defining role but also his most explicitly autobiographical as well. But yeah, there was a time not so long ago (as recently as 2014) when Paramount/Viacom Inc. was the master of the franchise-friendly tentpole game. It’s nice to see they’ve still got it.

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